Step 4: Other

Step 5: Closing Thoughts

Here we are at the end. I have shown you some of the software i like to use, though there is plenty more... Please leave comments that may provide hel...

This is my first instructable, and it is a guide showing you several of the programs that I love on my computer, because I want to give something back to this wonderful site. These software applications will cover a broad range of uses, including: legitimate work, data protection, data monitoring, internet use, etc.

Step 1: Internet

Okay, there are three programs i would like to describe for internet use, the first of which is opera Opera's website describes it as "The coolest, fastest, and most secure free Web browser available", and i agree 110%. Some of the things I love about it are: speed dial (a feature that allows you to have 9 home pages, to some extent (see picture), BETTER tabbed browsing (where a page would originally open a new window (pet peeve), opera opens a new tab, and the fact that if you close it, the next time you open it, it will have the same pages up.

The other program i would like to mention is utorrent. **NOTE: I am not endorsing internet piracy. Torrents, as with all peer-to-peer transfers, have legitimat uses, many things are in public domain, or are open-source**. that being said, utorrent is the lightest torrent software out there (weighing in at ~200 kilobytes). While I do not have any experience with other torrent programs, utorrent has treated me well. the great advantage to using torrents over other peer-to-peer transfers is that you are far less likely to pick up a virus, especially if you screen your transfers well.

The third is Sygate Personal Firewall. It is far better than the crappy windows firewall, which i disabled after this was installed. this software will ask you about which software you want to access your network. Every time something attempts to access the network, sygate will give you a nice little popup asking whether this software should be allowed through, at which point you can press yes or no, with the optional check to remember the answer for that software. it will also perform checks when software changes, i.e. when you update, or a program is mutated into a virulent form. It will also allow you to turn access fully on or fully off, fully open network is necessary for windows file sharing.

The version numbers are incomparable with each other. By your logic, if Firefox were to suddenly become version 1,000, then it would be better than Opera? Version numbers can only be used to compare a program to previous versions of a program.

Version numbers for Open Source projects always grow more slowly than their commercial counterparts. Since they don't have to convince people to buy an upgrade every 14 months, OSS programs/libraries usually only bump major versions when the code gets rewritten from scratch or incompatibly changes interfaces to other software. Besides, shouldn't Firefox/Thunderbird/SeaMonkey be at versions 8 or 9 by now if they continued the Netscape numbering?

yes, but like junkyard john said, blender 2.5 is completely recoded, and its not v. 3, its just 2.5. OSS developers (thank god) don't really care about version naming conventions. leave that to Microsoft and windows 7

No two software projects use the same numbering convention. For example, Opera might add a 0.5 everytime they do a bugfix. FIrefox goes into the hundredths for that. The number scales between software are not equal. Look at Blender 3d, for god's sake. They add a HUGE amount of features every time they go up 0.01. Their 2.5 release includes a re-writing of the whole visual structure and event handling...if they went with opera's updating scale, they would be at like 249.0 now!

it really does come down to personal preference: your choice of internet browser is your choice. also remember: i wrote this back in february, before the release of ff3. but i love it for other reasons too, like the f12 context menu (opens a menu allowing you to enable or disable things like proxies, javascript, sound (really wonderful when m00t decides ROW ROW, FIGHT THE POWAH!), etc) i am now a firefox user. why? i switched to ubuntu, and opera didn't seem to want to install correctly. i don't mind firefox, its a real gem of the open-source world, and it is really no better or worse than opera, like i said, its all personal preference.

vlc media player is the worst program I have ever seen. it took over all of the file associations on my computer and there is no way of setting them on the program. and i can't stand that orange cone icon thing it puts on all of the media files. the only reason it is still on my computer is that another program that i use a lot needs vlc to run.

wats the name of the program? yeah, vlc sets the file associations too. The only way to reset them is to: 1. Click on any open folder window. 2. Choose Tools>Options. 3. Click the File Types tab. 4. Navigate to the file types that u dont like. 5. You should get the idea.

6 simple steps: 1: Right Click the file that you would not like to have opened with VLC. 2: Click Properties 3: Click 'Change' next to 'opens with' 4: Select another media player of your choice 5: Click Apply 6: Next time you install something, pay attention instead of clicking next, I agree, and finish. Do some research before you accuse an open-source program to the "the worst program I have ever seen."

Can you set TrueCpyt "Drives" to read from physical drives and how to read the drive, like a DVD drive mounted through TrueCrypt and reading DVD disks from the CD Drive? Or could DaemonTools do that? (I mean read a ripped DVD "Image").